Back when it was new, Windows XP was the worst thing imaginable—ask Ars readers.

It wasn't meant to be this way. Windows XP, now no longer supported, wasn't meant to be popular. For all its popularity and sustained usage, people seem to have forgotten something important about it: it sucked.

The Ars forums are a place for geeks to hang out and chat about tech, and especially in light of the hostility shown toward Windows 8, we thought it might be fun to take a look at how our forum dwellers reacted when first introduced to Microsoft's ancient operating system.

The biggest problem with Windows XP was that it was Microsoft's first operating system to feature Product Activation, the licensing system that tied product keys to hardware fingerprints. Gone were the days of buying one copy of the software and installing it on multiple machines. With Windows XP, every system would need its own copy.

When the first news of activation broke, in January 2001, the response from the enthusiasts of the Ars forums was immediate—and broadly negative. The decision to lock down Whistler, as it was then known, was decried as evil.

The consequences of the Product Activation decision were to be many and varied. First of all, it meant that nobody would upgrade to Windows XP. Digitali said that he would be "staying with Win2K." madmanX was similarly "perfectly happy with win2k pro."

Others had even more exotic plans. Claiming that Microsoft had "officially gone too far," mav.rc wasn't going to put up with it, even if it meant having to switch to Linux, BeOS—remember BeOS?—or even, "(gasp!)," buying a Mac.

"Microsoft will learn this lesson or live to regret it."

Lawsuits were expected, and the burden on Microsoft of supporting online activation was argued to be immense, with activation expected to knock down core network infrastructure due to the loads it would create. Jeremy Reimer (then going by the moniker Lord Baldrick) expected a "huge" backlash, betting that Microsoft would back down in the long run.

Some of the claims were remarkably prescient, just not in the way their posters expected. Painless suggested that "one of these days people won't upgrade any more." This turned out to be somewhat accurate... it's just that it's Windows XP, Product Activation and all, that they'd stick with.

Another notable prediction came from amani, who said that Microsoft would simply force people to upgrade by "refusing to support older versions of Windows." What we've learned since then is that even cutting support doesn't, in fact, force people to upgrade. That's precisely the problem Microsoft is now facing.

Enlarge/ This is what Windows XP actually looks like for those who, like myself, are fortunate enough not to have seen it for many years.

Product Activation wasn't the only thing Windows XP had going against it. It was, in the view of many people, monumentally ugly. The bright colors of the "Luna" interface led to it being swiftly labeled a "Fisher-Price" or "Teletubby" operating system.

"It looks like a Fisher Price toy" wrote Spinlock. tmf2 was no fan either. "I dislike the Fisher-Price desktop scheme named Luna or Lunatic, something like that." Kosmo defended the use of the Fisher-Price description as it was a "brilliant reference to [Windows XP]'s candy-assed GUI."

Even before Windows XP was launched, the operating system's defenders in the Battlefront were tired of the Fisher-Price label, but it continued unabated. Even longtime Windows fans like, er, myself were displeased with the bulging, pseudo-3D design that Windows XP introduced.

It's an enduring criticism, and yet, it's one that apparently had no resonance with the broader consumer market. PC users flocked to Windows XP in droves, and not only were they not turned off by the Luna theme, many of them actually appeared to like it. Subsequent operating systems wouldn't stick with Luna, with Windows Vista and 7 both going for something arguably even more over the top with fakery, albeit less colorful, with the Aero Glass theme. Plainly, it wasn't actually a problem for Windows XP's adoption.

It did, however, keep me on Windows 2000 until that was no longer tenable.

Traditional problems

A Windows release wouldn't be a Windows release without worries about compatibility, and Windows XP had a harder time than most in this regard. It was the destination not just for Windows 2000 and NT 4 users, but also many millions of people migrating away from Windows 98 and its legacy of DOS compatibility. Even a year after release, Windows 98 SE was recommended as the platform to go for if you were a gamer.

To this day, there are still people clinging on to Windows 98, even going so far as to produce new drivers for the ancient operating system in a bid to let modern software run on it (though that project appears to be largely abandoned now, having received its last code change in 2013).

On top of all these, there were those who didn't want Windows XP to succeed for reasons that are best described as absurd. Self-styled security expert Steve Gibson proclaimed that Windows XP would somehow bring about the end of the Internet, thanks to its integrated support for raw sockets.

Raw sockets allow app developers to send network traffic that either spoofs its origin, making it harder to trace back to the source, or is malformed in particular ways, which can be useful in provoking bugs. Gibson felt that equipping a consumer operating system with such a capability was dangerously irresponsible (quietly failing to mention that there was already Windows 98 malware that took advantage of raw sockets simply by bundling suitable drivers).

Surprisingly, the normally divided forum community was unanimous in its rejection of the raw sockets brouhaha, with Flying Jelly Attack Confectionery writing "I am no fan of MS, but I think he is taking this a little too far."

Windows XP was released, and the end of the Internet didn't actually happen. Evidence that Windows XP's raw socket access was harmful was notable only by its absence. For no particularly good reason, Microsoft did restrict raw sockets in Service Pack 2 in a number of ways, a move that inconvenienced software (such as excellent port-scanning tool nmap) that legitimately used raw sockets. It did literally nothing to hinder malicious software.

It all just goes to show, a lot of the things that might worry nerds and Ars readers may not be such a big deal for the computer-using public.

This is an absurd attempt to re-write history, clearly intended as a surreptitious defense of Windows 8. Sure there were complaints with XP. There are always complaints. But overall, Windows XP was one of Microsoft's most smoothly-handled OS transitions ever.

Bullshit.

The DOS-based 9x line was fundamentally different, and plenty of users struggled with incompatibilities with software, drivers, and even the change from FAT to NTFS.

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This is understandable, when you recall that Windows XP was little more than a new skin on the already well-proven Windows 2000.

Win2k was a brilliant OS, but hardly anybody outside of businesses used it. The issues came from people transitioning from 95, 98, 98SE, and ME. There were no issues going from 2k to XP, even most drivers worked fine, but that's not what most people were using.

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Anyone who knew that -- presumably the vast majority of expert users -- would have had few complaints with XP.

So the article is an absurd attempt to rewrite history, to convince.... the tiny percentage of users who are experts? The "vast majority of expert users" is a minuscule fraction of overall users.

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On the upside, WinXP brought an almost unimaginable improvement in reliability to home users, who at that point were still on WIn98 or WinMe.

I thought you said they were on the "well-proven" Win2k? Who's rewriting history again?

I think by "stable" people meant "doesn' bluescreen all time". And this is true! XP had far fewer user-visible bugs than previous versions of windows.

So did Vista. And vista was especially difficult to BSOD since:

As far as BSODs go you are correct. No windows OS since XP has deserved a reputation for BSODding. But a lot of th new user-level stuff in Vista was either buggy or so bloated that it ate all your memory. Win7 basically fixed that (although to be fair, computers were faster by than).

This "article" is a great example of false equivalency. The complaints about XP can't compare with the complaints about Windows 8.

While there were obviously issues with XP at first release (as noted by others, there's ALWAYS issues with a major OS release), it was not difficult to transition from Windows 9x to XP... anyone who had used a Windows PC (or even a Mac) could sit down in front of XP and be productive almost right away. Yeah, there were complaints about the tele-tubby UI (which was easily fixed in settings), but it didn't get in the way of actually using the computer. The biggest issue was compatibility/driver issues, but it was generally understood that it needed to be done in order to move the OS forward into the modern era.

The major clusterfuck about W8 is that everything about Metro, which is shoved in your face whether you like it or not, makes it *more* difficult to be productive on the desktop. That's a sure-fire way to piss off your customers.

If by shoved in your face you mean... you need to click one button to get rid of it, I think ti's EXACTLY what this article is talking about. Literally, click the button that says "Desktop" and never use Metro again. How is that any different?

They took away completely the start menu, something that they've been training users to use since Win 95. Metro comes up every time you start the computer, or hit the windows key. Its a pain in the ass to use if you don't install something like Classic Shell.

All I know is I'm going to have more work. MS needs to provide a $20 copy of Win 7 that's specially designed to perform an in place upgrade of XP if they *really* want to get rid of XP.

Except that upgrading is probably the worst way to start a new os and will introduce more problems then a clean install

I agree with your technical point wholeheartedly, but I have a real question: Then what would you do when the client has an old program they LOVE and have to have it, that has been discontinued like Kodak EasyShare, and there are literally no installers on the internet to replace it? If I don't preserve that one special program or the EXACT way their computer is setup, they'd be really dissatisfied and might not pay me. Worse yet, they'd tell all their friends I broke their computer and then where would my business be? Seniors need their computers fixed right the way they want, just like everyone else does. It isn't their fault they were born way before computers became a necessity.

I hope you and I always have the desire to learn and are mentally able to learn, like we do now. Lots of my clients don't want to learn and some of them can't learn.

Windows XP's primary UI complaints were about its look. It was ugly. It still is.

My major complaint was over how slow it was. On the same hardware, a fresh install of XP was significantly slower than 2k. It was sluggish and unresponsive, and that was only slightly improved with future service packs. Even Vista SP2 is faster than XP on the same hardware.

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Windows 8's primary complaints are about feel.

Nope, everything can be used the same as the old Windows, it just looks different, and that freaks people out.

But a lot of th new user-level stuff in Vista was either buggy or so bloated that it ate all your memory.

So did XP. Again, you were recommended to have 256MB at least on an XP system at release; but machines often only had half, or a quarter of that.

Less than 256MB and the newly released Diablo 2 (which recommends 64MB with a minimum of 32MB) would get fairly prone to stuttering. You could get away with much less on 2000 and 98.

Best way to upgrade a machine around 2000? It was always to install more RAM. Remember "Download more RAM"?

Today however, that approach often won't give you anything at all. Volumes larger than 4GB is often only used for cache. Not even top-tier gaming machines are likely to need in excess of 6GB.But these are just about baseline for laptops these days; even Tablets are just 1-2 years off.

I liked XP from the beginning. It was the first Windows that *didn't* suck.

I agree with the sentiment, but not the historical accuracy. Windows 3.0 was the first Windows that didn't suck. Ran DOS better than DOS, had a more flexible GUI than the Mac, and did multitasking amazingly well.

Ah! But by that logic DOS was even better. Because *it could run Windows 3.0*. Windows couldn't run itself at all, let alone better than DOS could.

About two years back I was able to activate a copy of office 2000(?) on a new computer for someone with no money to upgrade, despite it being well out of support for several years. I'd expect the activation servers to stick around for at least a few more years.

That would have been Office XP/2003. Office 2k didn't need activation, just like Win2k

There were versions of Office 2000 that required it, though they eventually released an update that disabled it in 2003.

...won me over. However, I did like Win2k for the reasons mentioned. Problem was, when XP came out, so did all the malware for it that also was backwards compatible with win2k, so I begun to hate that OS.

Built in firewall that mostly worked? Not until SP2 it didn't.

Well, did you ever run into a 3rd party firewall screw up the winsock on a win98 machine? They all seemed to do it, and more often than not, cause more problems than solved.

IIRC it wasn't turned on by default for lan connections, but only for DSL and dial up.

I might as well add that until SP2, windows suffered from a lot of winsock issues, general winrot and such, and of course, IE6 and it accumulating such a big cache of web junk that slowed ie6 to a crawl.

This "article" is a great example of false equivalency. The complaints about XP can't compare with the complaints about Windows 8.

While there were obviously issues with XP at first release (as noted by others, there's ALWAYS issues with a major OS release), it was not difficult to transition from Windows 9x to XP... anyone who had used a Windows PC (or even a Mac) could sit down in front of XP and be productive almost right away. Yeah, there were complaints about the tele-tubby UI (which was easily fixed in settings), but it didn't get in the way of actually using the computer. The biggest issue was compatibility/driver issues, but it was generally understood that it needed to be done in order to move the OS forward into the modern era.

The major clusterfuck about W8 is that everything about Metro, which is shoved in your face whether you like it or not, makes it *more* difficult to be productive on the desktop. That's a sure-fire way to piss off your customers.

Completely disagree. Metro is not shoved in your face at all. I can go a week without seeing the start screen. It's exactly the same as the "Teletubby" issue. People see it, don't like it, and complain about it instead of working with it. You do have to configure Win 8 to a certain extent, but just like the person who cried FISCHER-PRICE at XP, they did so without realizing there is a very easy way to modify it to your liking.

I just reinstalled Windows 8 yesterday (I kind of installed update 1 early and patched it out of order, oops) it takes 5 minutes to reassign the file extensions to the old desktop apps, another two minutes of tweaks (many are now done for you with this latest update) and it is VERY similar to Win 7 in daily-use functionality. Mind you, by now I know what I'm doing and I understand it can be daunting at first, but really, be a geek man!

I remember the "fisher-price" moniker being thrown at Windows XP. Gosh-Darn-it, I'm old!

You are old? Dude I used DOS 2.0 on a PC with two 5.25 floppy drives on it and a 12" amber monitor. No hard drive. A 20MB external HD was an uber expensive accessory. We HATED DOS 4.x. That was Vista of its day.

Back in my day, we used a Commodore VIC20 with a tape player, and we liked it!

Yeah, I hated XP. By about 2005 it felt old, creaking everywhere. The ten-second lag for a context menu when I right-clicked on the desktop. Symantec's antivirus suite (this was years before MSSE or any other decent consumer AV). Spyware scanners. IE6. Wordpad, Paint, and a host of other minor utilities that were bundled with the OS and that I would have used all the time if they'd been updated since Windows 95.

I could have put up with that, but I went out and bought a Mac instead. It wasn't until Win7 that I used Windows again - and 7 I have a great deal of respect for. To this day it still does some things better than Mac OS IMO.

But now I run Linux (Debian Stable). Not something I'd recommend for most people, but it works for me.

My first computer was bought on 2004, well into XP territory. But there was this crazy rumor that Windows 98 is better for gaming, but I really liked the looks of XP. So I decided to dual boot, even in my tiny 40GB HDD. Of course in 2 months I knew 98 being good for games(Far Cry mostly) was complete bollocks, and cleaned it out. Only other time I dual booted was Windows 7 and 8 until it went into consumer preview.

Sad part is, even until 2 years after that I had to argue with people who claimed 98 is better than XP, after that I just tuned those people out.

This is an absurd attempt to re-write history, clearly intended as a surreptitious defense of Windows 8. Sure there were complaints with XP. There are always complaints. But overall, Windows XP was one of Microsoft's most smoothly-handled OS transitions ever.

Bullshit.

The DOS-based 9x line was fundamentally different, and plenty of users struggled with incompatibilities with software, drivers, and even the change from FAT to NTFS.

I went from Windows 98 to WinMe to Win2K. There were a few issues, but Win2K made me very happy, right from the start. I had surprisingly few problems with games. I suspect that developers shifted to the NT codebase as quickly as they could.

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This is understandable, when you recall that Windows XP was little more than a new skin on the already well-proven Windows 2000.

Win2k was a brilliant OS, but hardly anybody outside of businesses used it. The issues came from people transitioning from 95, 98, 98SE, and ME. There were no issues going from 2k to XP, even most drivers worked fine, but that's not what most people were using.

Like I said, I went from 9x to 2K. The transition had a few bumps, but considering the benefits, it wasn't bad at all. My point about 2K is that by the time XP came out, many of the issues were already well in hand. I was by no means the only early adopter, or gamer, who jumped at 2K.

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Anyone who knew that -- presumably the vast majority of expert users -- would have had few complaints with XP.

So the article is an absurd attempt to rewrite history, to convince.... the tiny percentage of users who are experts? The "vast majority of expert users" is a minuscule fraction of overall users.

It's an attempt to convince people who want to be convinced, that "there are always complaints" - therefore the complaints against Windows 8 are just par for the course." Which is total BS. The nature and quantity of the complaints is quite different. With XP, it was a few bumps that were clearly worth getting over. With Win8, it's bumps that are needless, and with very little pay-off for being got over. (See my other comment. The real problem with Win8 is not the 'bumps.')

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On the upside, WinXP brought an almost unimaginable improvement in reliability to home users, who at that point were still on WIn98 or WinMe.

I thought you said they were on the "well-proven" Win2k? Who's rewriting history again?

What I said was that WinXP was based on Win2K, and that the transition was therefore very smooth - for XP users. XP was actually the third generation of NT-kernel Windows. Microsoft took a phased approach, reaching out to home users last, and offering backward-compatibility options at every step. This contrasts dramatically to its more recent stance, where major UI changes - like the Ribbon, or the Start Screen - are rolled out across all markets simultaneously, and can be avoided only by means of expert hacks.

I liked XP from the beginning. It was the first Windows that *didn't* suck.

I agree with the sentiment, but not the historical accuracy. Windows 3.0 was the first Windows that didn't suck. Ran DOS better than DOS, had a more flexible GUI than the Mac, and did multitasking amazingly well.

Ah! But by that logic DOS was even better. Because *it could run Windows 3.0*. Windows couldn't run itself at all, let alone better than DOS could.

Windows 3.0 did in fact run DOS "better than DOS." For one thing, it let users multitask DOS programs. I was using DESQview when Windows 3.0 came out, and I quickly found Windows to be considerably superior. (DESQview died quietly, some time later.)

Windows XP was a killer OS in it's day. It combined the stability and security of the NT kernel with all of the user-facing goodies consumers expect.

It ran stably (unlike 9x), and ran practically anything you could throw at it (unlike NT/2000). What more could you ask for? What more could you possibly need?

In it's time, Windows XP was the greatest OS ever.

I preferred any number of Linux distros to Windows XP. Backwards compatibility was not a strong point of WinXP and it ran slower and less stably than Win2k. I was mostly a Linux fellow back then, but I loathed Windows XP. I didn't like it at all. Vista, despite all the hate was the first Windows OS I actually liked more than any Linux distro - but I was lucky in that I had a new, fairly powerful, PC when it came out, so I didn't mind the higher system specs.

I loathed Linux of the day.Maybe it was just the crappy distro we had to use.. but I remember one program (Acrobat reader, actually, maybe..) where the "print" command literally just brought up a text prompt that you had to type in an lpr command into. Use an incorrect command switch, and you could end up with pages and pages of gibberish. Yeah, that sucked..

I (still) kinda like using the command line for stuff.

I'm not saying Linux (and other non-MS alternatives) was much better than XP (although as a former open-source zealot, I certainly used to say exactly that), but I MUCH preferred using it and did not care for WinXP at all. I ran XP for the shortest possible time. I installed it when games stopped working on Win2k (mostly only used Windows for gaming) and I installed Vista as soon as a public beta was available.

To me, the first halfway decent OS Microsoft made was Win2k (I preferred command line to 3.11). It was stable, responsive and played most of the games I had. I thought Win95 was a poorly executed good idea (with Win98 a poor-but-better implementation of those ideas). Vista was the first MS OS I actively wanted to use more than a non-MS alternative. It had teething problems, but they can't really be laid at Microsoft's door.

I hate that Luna look of Windows XP. Stuck with the old fashion look until Royale Noir was release (comes with the Zune desktop theme), which looks like a really good Luna recolor but sports a few major performance enhancements under the hood. I think my grandmother is the only person I ever met that actually liked the look of Luna, which is weird since she usually doesn't like things that look childish.

Anyone remember the WinSock rest app Microsoft released for XP? For awhile there it was so commonly required that I assembled a script which would download and automate running it for a guild I was with in EverQuest. I believe that script was pirated by many other websites as well, which is silly since the page I put it on said they could use it free of charge if they just email a link of where it's being used (never got a single link).

Windows XP's primary UI complaints were about its look. It was ugly. It still is.

Agreed. Kind of a homey feel to it now, but not exactly elegant. Fortunately, it was easily skin-able.

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Windows 8's primary complaints are about feel.

I strongly disagree. This is the straw-man 'get over it' defense of Windows 8. The really important complaint is about direction. The feel is fix-able. Microsoft's direction - towards a walled WinRT garden, and a proprietary locked-in store - is not. Except by sending a very loud message that we will not accept it.

That's because you look at Windows 8 backwards. Windows 8 is a desktop operating system with Metro tacked onto it. It is not a Metro based operating system with a desktop (though RT pretty much is). There is nothing locked in about desktop apps, you install them the same way. I would LOVE, however, to download the latest version of, say, WinRar, from the Windows store and know it has no malware, or a thousand add-on homepage and search re-routers to carefully bypass during the installation, wouldn't you? You seem to feel you can't have one without the other, I see no reason why not.

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A secondary, but equally valid, complaint is that Win8 creates far too much disruption in exchange for the few real improvements it brings. Win8 doesn't actually address any of my own peeves with Windows 7. In my weeks with it, I saw zero gains in productivity or ease of use - only massive losses to frustration and needless re-learning of established procedures. It's not enough to say these things can be fixed. The time and effort to fix them counts on the negative side of the balance sheet - and there's very little on the positive side, even compared to WinXP.

I freely admit that Windows 8, as a $199 upgrade to Win 7 is not a good value proposition. There really isn't enough value there unless you really want to dive into the Metro ecosystem and the water there is shallow and cold. As an upgrade from XP or Vista though it is certainly the way to go, and there are significant productivity and stability (forced driver signing) improvements to make it well worth the effort.

If you just disabled the theme service it looked almost exactly like win2k.

I stayed on win2k for a long time, but eventually drivers started depending on XP specific stuff like "scanners and cameras" or whatever it was called. Upgraded to 7 when it was still beta.

Using 8.1 and classic shell today. I find the XP style in classic shell best, because you can still search, but if you open "all programs" you can see everything instead of having to scroll. Best of both worlds!

This "article" is a great example of false equivalency. The complaints about XP can't compare with the complaints about Windows 8.

While there were obviously issues with XP at first release (as noted by others, there's ALWAYS issues with a major OS release), it was not difficult to transition from Windows 9x to XP... anyone who had used a Windows PC (or even a Mac) could sit down in front of XP and be productive almost right away. Yeah, there were complaints about the tele-tubby UI (which was easily fixed in settings), but it didn't get in the way of actually using the computer. The biggest issue was compatibility/driver issues, but it was generally understood that it needed to be done in order to move the OS forward into the modern era.

Well said - that is exactly my recollection, but you've put it more concisely than I did.

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The major clusterfuck about W8 is that everything about Metro, which is shoved in your face whether you like it or not, makes it *more* difficult to be productive on the desktop. That's a sure-fire way to piss off your customers.

This is all very true, but, as I've pointed out in other comments, these usability problems are not the primary concern with Windows 8. It's what they say about the mindset at Microsoft. "There's ALWAYS issues with a major OS release" - but the issues with Windows 8 are not merely technical, they're fundamental.

For no particularly good reason, Microsoft did restrict raw sockets in Service Pack 2 in a number of ways, a move that inconvenienced software (such as excellent port-scanning tool nmap) that legitimately used raw sockets. It did literally nothing to hinder malicious software.

I know, but then 64-bit Vista introduced the KMCS requirement. BTW, the server versions of Windows still have full raw sockets support.

No it wasn't. The only people who bitched about XP were those who hated the fisher price feel. The rest did what you can't in Windows 8 or 8.1. Namely revert back to a classic mode. The people screaming that people will adapt and this is no worse then XP or Vista are those who are Microsoft astroturfers. I have had so many damn friends and relatives ask me to put 7 on their system that I had to stop for fear of my technet enterprise license getting hosed. Force feeding a UI to people who do not want it is BS. Actually more accurately its very Apple of Microsoft.

Windows XP's primary UI complaints were about its look. It was ugly. It still is.

Agreed. Kind of a homey feel to it now, but not exactly elegant. Fortunately, it was easily skin-able.

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Windows 8's primary complaints are about feel.

I strongly disagree. This is the straw-man 'get over it' defense of Windows 8. The really important complaint is about direction. The feel is fix-able. Microsoft's direction - towards a walled WinRT garden, and a proprietary locked-in store - is not. Except by sending a very loud message that we will not accept it.

That's because you look at Windows 8 backwards. Windows 8 is a desktop operating system with Metro tacked onto it. It is not a Metro based operating system with a desktop (though RT pretty much is). There is nothing locked in about desktop apps, you install them the same way.

Metro is not just "tacked on" - it's inescapable. Even in the latest update. Also, you seem to be unaware of Microsoft's whole WinRT strategy. There are signs that they're backing off a bit, and that's good. My complaint isn't chiefly with Metro - at this point the issues are fix-able - but what it portends for the future of Windows. (As a separate OS, I'd actually quite like Metro. A shame that Windows RT was so badly marketed...)

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I would LOVE, however, to download the latest version of, say, WinRar, from the Windows store and know it has no malware, or a thousand add-on homepage and search re-routers to carefully bypass during the installation, wouldn't you? You seem to feel you can't have one without the other, I see no reason why not.

I have no trouble at all downloading the latest version of WinRAR, without any of those problems. What's more, I greatly enjoy the freedom to get my software from Download.com, or Steam, or Amazon, and not just from Microsoft. You are free to not value that freedom, of course.

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A secondary, but equally valid, complaint is that Win8 creates far too much disruption in exchange for the few real improvements it brings. Win8 doesn't actually address any of my own peeves with Windows 7. In my weeks with it, I saw zero gains in productivity or ease of use - only massive losses to frustration and needless re-learning of established procedures. It's not enough to say these things can be fixed. The time and effort to fix them counts on the negative side of the balance sheet - and there's very little on the positive side, even compared to WinXP.

I freely admit that Windows 8, as a $199 upgrade to Win 7 is not a good value proposition. There really isn't enough value there unless you really want to dive into the Metro ecosystem and the water there is shallow and cold. As an upgrade from XP or Vista though it is certainly the way to go, and there are significant productivity and stability (forced driver signing) improvements to make it well worth the effort.

I wish all Windows 8 boosters were so willing to admit this. Personally, I don't deny that there are useful improvements in Windows 8. My complaint against Windows 8 - as a product - is not that it's bad, but that it's simply not good enough. The bulk of the market seems to agree with me. Windows 8 has failed to buy Microsoft a seat at the table in tablets (unless they're happy being a very distant third), and failed to galvanize PC sales. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft needs to refocus.

The reason for WinXP's success wasn't that computer users were flocking to it because they wanted it. WinXP's success was a combination of fortuitous timing and cut-throat business practices...

WinXP was introduced just as home PC ownership was becoming truly ubiquitous, when desktops were still showing climbing sales numbers, and it was surfing on the leading edge of the wave of truly affordable and portable laptops that followed. Combine that timing with the fact that, through various marketing and licensing agreements, it was almost impossible to get a newly manufactured brand-name PC without WinXP pre-installed and what do you get? A whole bunch of people using WinXP--that's what! The fact that its successor (Vista) was even more of a steaming pile of dog shit meant it continued to be "popular" (or, at least, a lesser of two evils) well beyond it's expected life...

WinXP wasn't the best OS you could have at the time--it was just what the non-tech-savvy (like myself) got stuck with.

Windows XP was a killer OS in it's day. It combined the stability and security of the NT kernel with all of the user-facing goodies consumers expect.

It ran stably (unlike 9x), and ran practically anything you could throw at it (unlike NT/2000). What more could you ask for? What more could you possibly need?

In it's time, Windows XP was the greatest OS ever.

I think you're remembering something very wrong.

XP was inheritly insecure, was remotely hacked within 24 hours of the release, and you couldn't even plug it into the internet from fresh install without getting immediatly infected until five years later when it got SP2.

Lets go back even further to when Windows 95 came out. If you guys think people hate Windows 8, you haven't seen anything. I wish I had some old FIDOnet forums archived from that era. People were losing their shit over Windows 95, predicting the end of the personal computer, etc.

What I've learned is that in nerd zealot wars, most of the people are up to their eyeballs in BS. I'd put money on at least 50% of the people here who claim "I don't run Windows 8 and never will!" probably are running Windows 8 and are looking for "hardcore nerd cred".

Me? I'm loud and proud, I love Windows 8 (especially 8.1). Just like I loved 95, and XP, and Vista (yeah, I loved Vista, sue me) and Windows 7.

Amen. The one part with which I don't agree is that those screaming the most shrilly against Win8 are secretly running it. They're not. Most of them, anyway. They're just holding out on Win7 just like those who held out on Win2k or Win98.

I'm another that remembers the cries of Doom every time MS releases a major revision to the OS. Loved this article. It's nice that somebody else remembers it, too. Hell, Windows itself was "just a plaything for people who don't know how to run a computer" when it first came out. As if "real men" only use command-line. People were crying "DOOM!" when Win95 came out and Windows got to be its very own OS and not a fancy shell on top of command.com. And when Progman went away? OMG!!!! MS is going to die over this! Nobody will ever buy another PC again! >eyeroll<

We'll "somehow" survive Win8, and yes, most everyone will adopt it, except those few holdouts who are convinced it's "the end of 'real' computing."

Win8 has its flaws, and I do agree that Microsoft could've done a better job of rolling out this new UI, but me, I'm on Win8.1 Update and couldn't be happier. My system runs faster and better, and while it definitely takes a learning curve, the new UI does have some definite advantages over the old one, even on a non-touch, mouse-only machine.

All I know is I'm going to have more work. MS needs to provide a $20 copy of Win 7 that's specially designed to perform an in place upgrade of XP if they *really* want to get rid of XP.

Except that upgrading is probably the worst way to start a new os and will introduce more problems then a clean install

Actually this is one of my major gripes with the MS operating systems. The only time I see a new install these days is when I buy a new box. This one is about 5 years old, which means it has probably seen four major versions of OSX and maybe a dozen or two minor upgrades. Never a clean install, because upgrades simply work.

Even when getting a new box, I never actually use the 'clean' OS because the first thing I do is hit the one-click clone option that I can't remember what is called and all my weird settings and obscure bsd software is effortlessly moved to my new box.

My recollection from these days is that WinXP when it first was released, it really did suck. It crashed all the time, drivers were often ineffective. I think I was still on NT 4 server on my laptop when it came out. I didn't switch to XP until service pack 2 came out, when wifi finally started working properly and generally drivers were stable and the thing worked well.

And when SP 3 came out, iirc, it broke a bunch of new stuff, making WinXP SP2 the DOS 3.3 of the decade - a de facto standard that all other Windows OS's would be measured against in terms of reliability and compatibility.

I remember the "fisher-price" moniker being thrown at Windows XP. Gosh-Darn-it, I'm old!

You are old? Dude I used DOS 2.0 on a PC with two 5.25 floppy drives on it and a 12" amber monitor. No hard drive. A 20MB external HD was an uber expensive accessory. We HATED DOS 4.x. That was Vista of its day.

Back in my day, we used a Commodore VIC20 with a tape player, and we liked it!

(Well, actually, we didn't like it, but we didn't have a choice!)

pfft, get off my lawn, kid. I still got a PDP8 with a few rolls of punch tape in the attic.